Tutorial: Lens Flares in UDK

imbueFX

Hey everyone,

I've finally gotten back to making new tutorials for imbueFX. This new one is 30 minute breakdown on making a simple anamorphic prime lens flare in UDK. And it's free! Check it out and please provide your feedback.

http://imbuefx.com/products/introduction-to-lens-flares-in-udk/

Thanks everyone!

Ace-Angel

As always, awesome! I noticed abit of color bleed in some parts of the flare being white when they shouldn't be, is this a texture limitation or video compression issue?

Visceral

Did you fix the audio on the 4rth vid?

imbueFX

@Ace: I think it's because I have it setup to get super-white on closer distances, so it blows out the texture (as well as exaggerates the compression artifacts of the flare).

@Visceral: YES and thank you so much for pointing that out. I owe you!

RAL

Great set of videos you've got here, really clear and easy to follow. Not sure if you're aware, but Part 03 ends at about 4:50 but continues to go on until the 7 mins. are up.

A few questions as well:
I haven't made lens flares in UDK but I remember there being some lens flare specific nodes in the material editor. Your material with a vertex color node works just fine. Are these nodes not necessary anymore? Referring to these: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialsCompendium.html#LensFlareIntensity

As for the lens flare textures themselves, how did you create them? I've used Optical Flares (After Effects Plugin) and its great, just curious how others go about making their lens flare textures.

https://www.videocopilot.net/products/opticalflares/

Not really a question but something I was told to take note of when I was making lens flares at work. When editing the distance,scale, etc. values of a lens flare its important to edit your values with the game window running. Game view isn't as accurate as the running game window format, whether its 4:3 or 16:9. Again, not super important for introduction stuff but thought it'd be interesting to share.

Thanks for another set of tutorials, looking forward to checking out more.

Money

Nice work.
Just one small note regarding ray distance, it can go into negative values as well to give components that are behind the source like on this pic. Something I bumped upon when analyzing how they did them in ME where they used this for the Sun.

imbueFX

@Blood_falcon: Thank you for pointing that out, I really dropped the ball on QC with these videos. I'll make sure to fix that when I get home tonight. I rushed to get this out and done yesterday, so things like that slipped pass me.

Regarding your questions: Yes I do cover some of those material expressions in the last chapter. Again this is just a starters guide, so I only cover certain parts of making a lens flare. 2 of the textures are painted by hand in photoshop, the other (the glass element) is from a photo that I basically stole. The Video Co-pilot stuff looks great, but I've never had a chance to actually use it. Looks very powerful and robust.

@Money: Thanks! You're right, that's something that I should have mentioned. I was thinking of making a more "complete" lens flare with lots of more elements as a new chapter. If I ever get around to it, I'll make sure to bring it up.

Thanks everyone!

Jacky

Thank you for the tutorial!